Our ambulance bounced up the shoulder of the interstate. The freeway was a parking lot, backed up for miles. Greg and I jumped out when our truck slowed near the scene; we jogged the last few yards. Our rescue truck, driven by Dan, pulled up right behind us. Dan got out, and elevated the big light tower. He turned the lights on and night turned into a black and white movie.
What we saw was horrible. There was a destroyed motorcycle and body parts.
Greg and I stood next to each other.
“Fuck,” I said.
I looked at Greg, “You take patient care? I’ll take triage?”
He nodded, “Got it.” He walked over to the first patient, a guy laying on the road, missing a leg. Greg yelled to Dan, “Dan, see if you can find this guy’s leg! I think I saw it by the white pickup they hit.”

We were at a house fire. This time I had command. One room of the home was fully involved. We’d transported one patient with full-thickness burns who would later die. We were short of firefighters. I got on the radio and told the interior attack crew to come out; they’d been in too long. The last one out was Paul. He took off his SCBA mask and I noticed that his face was grey. He staggered. My heart went to my throat. I jumped out of the truck and jogged over to him. He waved me away, saying he was fine, but I walked him over to the rehab station and asked the medic to check him out.

I was kneeling on the highway. We’d just extricated the only survivor of a family of five from a head-on crash. Bruce, our captain that night, put his hand on my shoulder. “This sucks man. Why don’t you go home? We’ll call Laurie and tell her to take care of you.”

​I tell these stories, stories that any firefighter will recognize, when people ask me to describe my volunteer fire department.
My fellow volunteers are people whom I care deeply about. But I would never known them were it not for the department.

We are born-again Christians, ministers, ex-military, gun-toting NRA guys, lawyers, artists, contractors, Republicans, Independents, Democrats, the uber-liberal, gay, straight, radical feminists, and what I am sure was the only anarchist-socialist-atheist firefighter in the state.

​Yet for decades, we’ve been close as a department. Even in the last few years, when the country seems to be tearing apart, we take care of each other. We enjoy being together and know we are serving — together — an important purpose.

It is the work that bonds us.
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Standing there in the middle of that chaos of the motorcycle-truck collision, with people yelling and body parts strewn across the highway, Greg and I knew we had to solve this together, we had to go through this and come out the other side with each other. These are among the most honest and ruthless moments humans can share.

They are honest because in those times we are vulnerable and scared. They are ruthless because the decisions we make together in those moments are life or death — save someone or watch them die.

Firefighting Transcends Politics
Our work — a privilege — transcends politics. Fires are apolitical. Our work transcends whatever faith you put your faith in. On the fire ground, the crazy conservative has my back and I — an insane liberal — will do all I can to save his. The atheist has the Catholic who watches out for the Baptist telling the agnostic to be safe.

​It is not simply a catch phrase that firefighters think of the vocation as a Brother and Sisterhood.

A Call to a Nation Divided: Unite Like Firefighters
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How does this inform us as a nation divided? I celebrate human differences. But we can and must come together when we need one another: when the barn needs to be built, the car rescued from the flood, the child caught jumping from the burning building.
Most of us, even in our fragmented world, yearn for the kind of connectedness and love that exists when people come together to do vital work. We are here, after all, to do important and meaningful things. We are at our best when we do it together. Fire Departments prove that every day.

A lifetime ago when I was a dancer, we’d be in rehearsal or on stage, all of us, when we would forget we were dancers and just dance with abandon, big circles of us to the music of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Copland’s Rodeo. Bright faces, colored lights, sweat flying and the joy of humans dancing.

These moments are connected for me.

The physical act of dancing transported us. This is what dance is supposed to do. We were not just struggling artists, we were not just a wedding party, we were all part of a larger universe of us: Humans, dancing. We were connected to the First Tribes, who danced before there was a name for it.

Can you imagine us, pounding our feet in the dirt, faces glowing in the fire underneath comets, bursting novas and stars? Can you imagine?

I can. I don’t need to eat. I just need to keep spinning in that circle of us, dancing with tears in my eyes. Nor do I need to sleep, the radiance of the people around is enough for me.

This is what transcendence feels like. We lose ourselves. We no longer experience ourselves through the lens of self-awareness or self-pity. We stop thinking about how we look and whether we fit in. We are in the circle of dancers and that’s enough.

But transcendence is temporary. Life is hard, there is suffering and pain. People leave us, punching holes in our spirits. We can be ground down by the daily inanity.

Sadness can envelope us and loneliness can eat at our souls. We want to exhume ourselves from sadness. Sometimes we just don’t know how. So we dance.

Thirty years after my sister Katie died, I felt the need to dance. I was thirty-six. Alone, through the entire house I flung myself around until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to paint my face in the ancient Celtic way and be violent for a night, smashing all that I could find in that rage-against-the-young-dying. But I danced until I fell to the floor and slept.

Even dancing alone, I felt connected, in John Dunne’s words, “a part of the main.” I was just one more human, one more of the billions of us that are and have been, experiencing and expressing humanness by dance.

The Hora. The Circle. Arms around each other. Moving slow, moving faster, flying now, clinging to each other, spinning, laughing, crying and holding tightly to each other. Don’t let go. Never let go. We face the universe; cold, frightening and mysterious, and we dance…

Our patient was eighty-nine-years old with Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a progressive, incurable neurologic disease.

For our patient, maybe twenty years ago, it began with a small tremor in his hand. But now it had rendered him helpless. Helpless: completely dependent on others for survival; you can’t feed yourself, clean yourself or move without assistance.

It doesn’t matter if you were once a powerful CEO, or a hard-core individualist—diseases like Parkinson’s don’t discriminate.

The page went out as a “public assist call.” His wife needed our help to lift him off the toilet and back in to his bed.

Let me stop here. If you’re young, busy with life and work and you think, “I don’t want to hear about lifting a patient off a toilet, this has no relevance to me,” please think again.

Why? Each of us, in our turn will likely play one of these roles. We will need to be lifted and cradled like a child, or we will be the care-giver, the lifter, the caller to the fire department because we simply do not have the strength. O’ my friends who believe themselves unique, immortal and indestructible: it’s immutable truth; all living things are vulnerable, even you.

No Exceptions, No One Exempt

When our patient was in his thirties I’m sure he was well over six feet tall. There were pictures of him in the hallway, portraits of an active and vibrant man. He was still taller than me, but now he’d atrophied down to, at best, one hundred pounds.

He had lost control of his bowels and bladder. It’s the natural progression, part of the disease. His wife profusely apologized for the mess and the smell, but we told her there was no need. We should stop pretending. This is who we all will become. We will lose control of our very basic functions, we will cede control of ourselves to others.

He was sitting on the toilet facing us. Our first task was to lift him, turn him and sit him in his wheel chair.

Did you know that we now have archeological evidence that suggests that 40,000 years ago, our ancestral tribes were taking care of the elderly and weak? At first glance, from an evolutionary point of view that doesn’t make sense. Why not cull the weak and injured? But there is a deeper evolutionary drum beat. The impulse to care for the tribe and even the most vulnerable is the glue that allowed us to survive.

We should stop pretending. This is who we all will become.

I squatted down in front of him and lifted his arms around my shoulders. I reached around his back and hugged him. Then I stood up with him in my arms. We stood there for a minute finding our balance, holding on to each other. I murmured the words of every firefighter or medic ever in this situation, “I got you, I’m not going to let you fall.”

His chin was resting on my shoulder, I felt his breath and beard against my neck. My partner that day, Terry, reached in and repeated, “We got you, we’re going to take care of you.”

We gently maneuvered him to his wheelchair and then slowly rolled him down the hall and lifted him into his bed. His wife continued to clean him and thanked us again. He smiled and then closed his eyes and slept.

The Compassion of Human Nature

Walking out of their house I felt content. It was such a little thing, a public assist call, helping a very sick man back into bed. But in that hour or so, I forgot all my problems and pains, all my worries. During that hour we were doing the most important work any of us can do—caring for someone else.

It’s immutable truth; all living things are vulnerable, even you.

“We got you” is our slang for this. The desire to help is core to our identity as firefighters. The adrenaline addiction to big fires wears off eventually. But that impulse to say, “we got you, we’re going to take care of you” endures. Diving in with our hands and hearts, diving in to the mess of us, vulnerable, needy and helpless is, as it always has been, the essence of being human.

I know there has been a lot of turmoil about police lately. Like others, I’ve been horrified by young black men dying at the hands of police for seemingly innocuous reasons. A broken tail light should not be punished by death. Being black at the wrong time and wrong place should not be a roll of the dice where the stakes are being shot. ​ A hysterical cop, the calm voice of the mom narrating the death of her loved one and being told not to move by the officer, the 4-year-old girl in the back seat. I will never lose those images.

And I couldn’t believe the carnage in Dallas yesterday, July 7th. Watching police run to help a comrade, a friend, on the ground bleeding was just too much for me to handle. Seeing it on a screen makes it two-dimensional, abstract. In real life –the adrenaline, the terror, the smell of blood and concrete –watching someone you know and love, die, is not abstract. It will tear you apart.

So much death. So much suffering to come. So fucking tragic.

But this story is about police officers and kindness. As a firefighter, I work with state police and sheriffs all the time, responding to drug overdoses, domestic violence calls and car crashes. It’s hard work. Police deal daily with a host of problems that most of us never encounter. It takes a toll.

Here is the story.

We responded to a car crash. A single vehicle crash in the median of the interstate during rush hour. The driver — drunk — had tried to drive across the median and got hung up on the barriers.

Pulling up on the scene, I said a little “thank you” for the barriers, having been at more than a few horrific crashes when drunks had crossed over a median and caused head-on collisions.

On this night, it was dark, cold and, with all the traffic, loud. Our patient, a woman, was drunk, upset and clearly mentally “unstable.” She wasn’t hurt, although that can be difficult to assess with a possibly drunk patient.

Once our medics had done their assessment and felt comfortable that the patient was medically okay, the deputy sheriff began his interview.

Our patient sat on the bumper of the med unit, crying and fidgeting. She stood up and one of the medics reached out his arm to help her and she bit him — not hard, but still, this was a volatile patient.

I watched the sheriff, a big burly guy, walk her through the standard DUI tests. Follow the light with your eyes, don’t move your head. Count down from 63 to 47. Touch your fingers to thumb in order. Say the alphabet, but don’t sing it. He had to repeat a number of these steps.

But he never was impatient, standing in the cold, traffic flying by us on both sides. He was calm, patient and even gentle.

Finally — and we all knew where this was headed — he said, “I’m going to make your day a little worse. I’m going to arrest you for DUI.”

She dropped her head, but she also had calmed down. He gently cuffed her and led her to the squad car. This was a good cop doing his job.

Choosing Kindness

Our patient was volatile, but the officer deescalated the situation. He was in charge, but also kind. Assertive, but gentle.
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It seems like a little thing, but after decades of watching DUI arrests — many ending in yelling and screaming with suspects face down and cuffed — I truly appreciated this deputy sheriff’s ability.
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This was yet again another call out to me. We can do our jobs and we can still be kind. We can run on our 100th drunk, and we can still be kind. We can roll our eyes at yet another crazy, homeless person’s lies, or we can still be kind.For me, it comes down to who I want to be in my life, how I want to be remembered. ​

I choose kindness.

This officer — and I’m sure he’s had bad days like all of us — chose kindness. That night he taught me a lesson.

It was my fifth year on the Department. We had been paged to a rollover. In the middle of the scene, I jerked open the doors to the med unit. The young man inside was being treated for minor injuries from rolling his truck. He had been drinking and driving on a snowy road. He looked at me pleadingly. “Did you find my girlfriend, did you find Christina?” “You killed her,” I yelled back, “you son of a bitch, you killed her.”

The Sheriff pointed towards the door. “Get off my scene!” she said sternly.

I was furious and out of control. We had found his girlfriend in a field. She was in the snow, face down, arms and legs spread out as if she was making a snow angel. That was the name we gave her: the snow angel.
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Radical Kindness Isn’t Easy

I try to infuse my life with “radical kindness,” where I behave with generosity regardless of how I’m treated, regardless of whether the kindness will ever be returned, regardless of whether someone “deserves” to be treated kindly.

But as you can see, it’s often not easy. There are times when we are pushed to our limits. We’re exhausted, afraid, angry, judgmental.

For me, drunk drivers take me to my limits. They have caused most of the traumatic, nightmare-inducing calls that I’ve been on. I now seem to have a little switch in my brain that turns on when I smell alcohol at a crash. I am out of my body for a while, and I can feel that rush of righteous anger descend on me.

It’s an interesting word, “righteous.” In these angry moments I feel I am somehow morally superior, more decent, virtuous–“better than.” Because you are less than me, I don’t have to be kind; I can justify being unkind, even cruel.

“You son of a bitch, you killed her.”

Slayer or Victim?

Yet here is the thing. Not long after my outburst, I did some soul searching and I remembered this: When I was seventeen—a young man—on a winter’s night in Minnesota, I drove my girlfriend home on an icy interstate. We’d both had a couple of beers. The car slid. We did a 360 on the interstate, surrounded by traffic. We were terrified.

When the car straightened out, we broke out laughing.

I ask you as I asked myself: what is the difference between the young man at the beginning of the story, and the young man in Minnesota years ago?

In Antigone, Sophocles wrote, “Who is the victim, who is the slayer? Speak.” The truth is that we’ve all been both. Slayer and victim, guilty and innocent, righteous and dishonorable, compassionate and cold.

We are at core, at root, imperfect and fallible beings. When we understand we are both victim and slayer, when we understand that we have screwed up as much as anyone we walk past on the street, it’s much more difficult to be judgmental, to be righteous. And it is much easier to be kind.

It doesn’t mean that I’m not still be angry or frustrated at yet another DUI death. But now I remind myself that the only likely difference between that young driver and me is that I had better tires. That makes it much more difficult for me to feel self-righteous, and easier to be kind.

If You’re Struggling

So what are we to do when that righteous anger boils up? Or when fatigue causes stress and you’re at your limit?

One of my fellow firefighters suggests: “If you can’t be kind, be nice. If you can’t be nice, be professional.”

I’d add to that: when you’re furious at someone else’s recklessness and stupidity, remember that in all likelihood you’ve been there yourself, like me. It is easy and commonplace to blame, to be righteous and to be angry. It is difficult, rare and yet so needed to provide compassion and forgiveness. In the larger picture, we all share the experience of being human.

My challenge now is to be kind at every (inevitable) DUI crash.

Last word: I’m not a fan of Big Ideas. I have lived through multiple decades of “earth shattering” ideas only in the aftermath to discover it is still you and me simply trying to live our lives. However, I am an evangelist for the small moments of transformation. Every day presents us with those small moments to understand someone, to care and to be kind.